Recent late-night school-board discussions have centered on the possibility of pulling school principals off of their salary schedules and allowing them to negotiate for pay increases.

"We have strong people leading these schools, trying to make a whale of difference," said Steve Hinton, Re-1 school-board president. "I think that they should have the confidence to come before this board and negotiate for their salaries."

Similar to the teachers’ salary-schedule adjustments, discussions over the principals’ schedules began with the goal of making their salaries competitive with schools of similar size and location.

"When we wrote to other school districts to find out what their average highs and lows of the principals’ salaries were, they couldn’t give us one," said Re-1 Superintendent Bill Thompson, "so we assumed that their principals were negotiating for their salaries."

Thompson said this was something that the Re-1 district had done in the past. "The first two years that I worked in this district, I had to negotiate for my salary," he said.

Byron Wiehe, Cortez Middle School principal and salary-committee spokesperson, said that while many of the principals are interested in the idea of negotiating for their salary, they are concerned over the criteria by which they will be judged.

"Right now we are in limbo," said Wiehe. "April 13 and 20 and May 4 have been set aside for principal/school-board retreats where we will focus on salary schedules and negotiations.

"At the retreat we will try to nail it down and decide if we want to go to a regular, step-based salary schedule or if we want to negotiate [with boundaries] for our salaries," Wiehe said. "But before the principals decide to negotiate for their salaries, they want to have some boundaries laid down."

The salary committee spokesman said he would expect the principals to be judged on their major day-to-day responsibilities, which include fiscal responsibility for their school’s budget, academic progress, implementation of state standards, staff and personnel evaluations, superintendent evaluations and the principal’s contribution to the district outside their own school.

"Before any of this is decided, however, the principals would have to get together and come to a consensus," he said.

School-board member Sue Baacke said the board probably is not going to negotiate with the principals for their salaries until at least next year. "We just don’t have the parameters set up yet," Baacke said. "This year we will deal with the principals as a group using the salary schedule that is already in place from the past."

He would feel comfortable sitting down with the principals and discussing salaries, Baacke said, but not everybody is going to be.

"At the last school-board meeting [March 21], I tried to catch the reaction of the principals who were in the audience as we were discussing the possibility of negotiations — and all of them seemed to be nodding in approval of the idea," he said. "I didn’t see any dissension."

Wiehe agreed that during the school-board meeting, most of the principals seemed to favor the idea; however, he said there is some added pressure when a principal is sitting in front of the board. Some of the principals may have been hesitant to speak out against the idea in that kind of setting, he said.